Hi friends,
Launching a new story here … a bit of revisionist history I’ve had floating about in my head the last day or two. It will be coming out slowly over the coming weeks.
And attention artists: a challenge for you. I’d love to see some accompanying art posted on the thread. Remember, it’s a period piece with most of the action backdropped against well known Vatican sites such as St. Peter’s Square, the Sistine Chapel, and Castel Sant’Angelo.
THE CARDINAL BISHOP AND HIS FEMALE POPE
1.
Cardinal Bishop Praetorio strode quickly across the rubbish strewn pavements of St. Peter’s Square. It was still very early in the morning and the basilica’s great forecourt, laid out in the middle of the 17th century and elegantly embraced within Bernini’s curved double-colonnaded arms was deserted. His countenance was grim. Not even the gloriousness of the first rays of an early morning sun casting a bright halo over St. Peter’s massive dome and the statues of the apostles spaced out along the top of its broad facade could tempt him to look up.
Praetorio’s body language telegraphed his acute feelings of distress. He held his head lowered and his gait was exceedingly brisk. Tall and thin by the standards of his colleagues Praetorio had a long stride, which was exaggerated by the way in which his scarlet red cardinal’s “Ferreauloa” cape flowed out behind him. A sense of urgent purpose was further enhanced by the forward position of the red biretta he wore atop his long angular head.
The Cardinal Bishop’s destination was the very center of the square … more specifically the place where a heavy wooden cross had been erected the day before. The object of his attention was the naked young woman, who hung from it … crucified in the old Roman fashion.
A crucifixion in that place was in itself most unusual, and that of a naked woman even more so, for after all this day was the second day of April of the year of our Lord, 1691, far from Roman times. But what was even more astoundingly unusual was that the naked woman nailed to that cross was, or at least had recently been, Pope … the Vicar of Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church!
A woman Pope had been revolutionary. She had been the 242nd Pontiff, having succeeded Pope Alexander VIII, who had been Pope for barely a little over a year when he suddenly fell ill and died. His unexpectedly sudden death threw the Church into crisis, as rival factions moved to elevate their favorites. In the end, the impasse had only been resolved by elevating a relatively unknown contestant from north of the Alps.
Little had been known of this northern Bishop, but as things turned out the most glaring and crucial missing piece of information was that this new Prince of the Church was actually a woman. A fact that had been elaborately disguised for years, for under her clerical robes and vestments she had succeeded remarkably, through bindings and ingenious subterfuge, to disguise the true nature of her gender.
The unimaginable specter of a woman becoming Pope had long haunted the College of Cardinals. Legend had it that back in the 800s it had actually happened. The heroine of that popular legend was known as Pope Joan. And while the veracity of her story had been widely debunked, the thought that it might actually happen was something the College deeply feared and took steps to guard against.
And therein lay part of Praetorio’s angst on this morning. For in his role as Cardinal Bishop, he served as Dean of the College of Cardinals (Decanus Collegii Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalium). And in that capacity it had been his duty on the occasion of her ascension to ascertain her sexuality through a practice in which the candidate must submit to what was vulgarly referred to by his colleagues as a papal grope … a procedure in which the papal candidate sat on a special chair with a hole in the seat while he, as Cardinal Bishop, performed the task of putting his hand up the hole to check whether the candidate had testicles.
He had dutifully performed the ritual, and had discovered the truth. But, fearful that the truth would plunge a divided College, not to mention the entire Church, into a bitter and potentially damaging struggle, he chose to conceal his discovery, and as a result she became Pope and he and she together continued to take every conceivable step to conceal her gender identity.
There was, however, more to his decision to deceive his colleagues and perpetuate the charade he had signed onto. He had taken the time and effort beforehand to study the record of her accomplishments as she had risen through the Church. It was an impressive one. And he believed her to be exactly the kind of reformer that an institution grown old and venal over the centuries desperately needed.
In his role as her chief confidant and advisor he had proceeded to work closely with her over the few weeks of her short papal reign. And she had more than met his expectations, delivering a flood of papal bulls and rulings banning long-entrenched corrupt practices, dispersing ill-gotten church resources amongst the poor, dismissing officials and clerics in wholesale numbers at all levels, and even issuing a call for the ultimate revolutionary reform … declaring that priestly celibacy should cease, that women be ordained into the priesthood, and that even the highest levels of the clerical hierarchy be open to them.
In addition he had, of course, fallen in love with her, and fallen prey, incomprehensibly, to turning a blind eye to the mounting determination among his colleagues to get rid of her as quickly as possible and by any means. Yes, incomprehensible from a practical standpoint, perhaps, but then love is blind and never rational.
And so, now, as he gazed up at her nude form, arms outstretched and cruelly nailed through slender wrists, knees bent, feet nailed side-by-side, soles pressed against the face of the cross’s stout upright … the body of his beloved Barbara of Mohr, an obscure district of the Rhenish-Palatinate, and until recently, Pope Innocent XI … his eyes filled with the bitter tears of sadness and regret.
Wiping away the tears with his sleeve he renewed his gaze, slowly raising his view, beginning first with her feet … bloody, pierced and broken. And from there following her splayed open legs upward to where a rough-hewn, blood-stained cornu, affixed to the upright to give her respite from the rigors of crucifixion and prolong her sufferings, protruded from between and beneath her buttocks. The splaying of her legs had also rendered her sex rudely exposed, its outer lips parted to display the delicate intimacies of its inner folds, hood and slit.
However closely she and Praetorio had worked with one another, their relationship had remained chaste, never venturing into the pleasures of the flesh that might easily have come their way, although on at least one occasion they had come dangerously close. She had been Pope, and he her trusted councilor, friend and protector. Quite naturally then, to see her loins so openly exposed was for him a source of deep sorrow and anguish. But also, and uncomfortably so, he was finding it a source of arousal that he wished to control but couldn’t.
Moving on, his eyes advanced quickly over her mons pubis with its triangular thatch of curly dark hair, and on to her slender girlish hips, tautened belly and deeply indented navel. He saw how the serried lines of her ribs defined her chest, stretched and forced outward as it was by the strain of her crucifixion. And riding high were her pale teardrop-shaped breasts, upon which floated, like circles and points, a matched pair of pebbled areolae and perkily erect nipples.
Beyond were a pair of freckled shoulders, tautly outstretched arms, nailed and bloodied wrists, and hands with inwardly clawed fingers. As he watched, her head moved, listing off to one side and coming to rest against shoulder and raised arm, eyes closed and partially veiled by wisps of disheveled hair fallen over her face.
He would have thought her unconscious, were it not for the fact that she broke silence with a long throaty moan, stirred and then struggled and strained vainly to shift her position before exhaustion defeated the effort and she allowed her head to fall forward, chin resting against her chest.
She lives and suffers so, he thought to himself. But for how much longer? Soon the crowds would return, to gawk and point at her once again, as they had the previous day, and to pitilessly mock her … all part of the theatre … the humiliation and repudiation that her staged public execution by crucifixion on St. Peter’s Square had been contrived so carefully to evoke.
Praetorio bowed his head once again in grief. He felt responsible for her, for all that had happened. He had been blinded by ambition and righteousness and, yes, by her intelligence and beauty. And it had all gone so terribly wrong.
She stirred. Crying out in anguish she once again attempted to push herself up with her legs, but she simply hadn’t the strength and was soon forced, after raising herself slightly, to fall back … succeeding only in impaling herself further on that dreadful cornu. Then she lifted her head momentarily as though to speak. He thought she had detected his presence. But all she managed was to blink her eyes once or twice.
Despondent, Praetorio settled back on his haunches, resolved to maintain his lonely vigil until the crowds returned.
And as he knelt there, alone with his thoughts, he allowed his mind to relive the past three days, and their sequence of events .. her betrayal and discovery, her arrest and confinement in the dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo, her staged torture, confessions and trial in the Sistine Chapel before the assembled College of Cardinals, her condemnation and the revelation of a shockingly unprecedented sentence, condemning her to be crucified and shamed as an antichrist before an enraged public in St. Peter’s Square, and the horrors of how that symbolic display had played out over the course of the previous day.
TBC
Launching a new story here … a bit of revisionist history I’ve had floating about in my head the last day or two. It will be coming out slowly over the coming weeks.
And attention artists: a challenge for you. I’d love to see some accompanying art posted on the thread. Remember, it’s a period piece with most of the action backdropped against well known Vatican sites such as St. Peter’s Square, the Sistine Chapel, and Castel Sant’Angelo.
THE CARDINAL BISHOP AND HIS FEMALE POPE
1.
Cardinal Bishop Praetorio strode quickly across the rubbish strewn pavements of St. Peter’s Square. It was still very early in the morning and the basilica’s great forecourt, laid out in the middle of the 17th century and elegantly embraced within Bernini’s curved double-colonnaded arms was deserted. His countenance was grim. Not even the gloriousness of the first rays of an early morning sun casting a bright halo over St. Peter’s massive dome and the statues of the apostles spaced out along the top of its broad facade could tempt him to look up.
Praetorio’s body language telegraphed his acute feelings of distress. He held his head lowered and his gait was exceedingly brisk. Tall and thin by the standards of his colleagues Praetorio had a long stride, which was exaggerated by the way in which his scarlet red cardinal’s “Ferreauloa” cape flowed out behind him. A sense of urgent purpose was further enhanced by the forward position of the red biretta he wore atop his long angular head.
The Cardinal Bishop’s destination was the very center of the square … more specifically the place where a heavy wooden cross had been erected the day before. The object of his attention was the naked young woman, who hung from it … crucified in the old Roman fashion.
A crucifixion in that place was in itself most unusual, and that of a naked woman even more so, for after all this day was the second day of April of the year of our Lord, 1691, far from Roman times. But what was even more astoundingly unusual was that the naked woman nailed to that cross was, or at least had recently been, Pope … the Vicar of Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church!
A woman Pope had been revolutionary. She had been the 242nd Pontiff, having succeeded Pope Alexander VIII, who had been Pope for barely a little over a year when he suddenly fell ill and died. His unexpectedly sudden death threw the Church into crisis, as rival factions moved to elevate their favorites. In the end, the impasse had only been resolved by elevating a relatively unknown contestant from north of the Alps.
Little had been known of this northern Bishop, but as things turned out the most glaring and crucial missing piece of information was that this new Prince of the Church was actually a woman. A fact that had been elaborately disguised for years, for under her clerical robes and vestments she had succeeded remarkably, through bindings and ingenious subterfuge, to disguise the true nature of her gender.
The unimaginable specter of a woman becoming Pope had long haunted the College of Cardinals. Legend had it that back in the 800s it had actually happened. The heroine of that popular legend was known as Pope Joan. And while the veracity of her story had been widely debunked, the thought that it might actually happen was something the College deeply feared and took steps to guard against.
And therein lay part of Praetorio’s angst on this morning. For in his role as Cardinal Bishop, he served as Dean of the College of Cardinals (Decanus Collegii Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalium). And in that capacity it had been his duty on the occasion of her ascension to ascertain her sexuality through a practice in which the candidate must submit to what was vulgarly referred to by his colleagues as a papal grope … a procedure in which the papal candidate sat on a special chair with a hole in the seat while he, as Cardinal Bishop, performed the task of putting his hand up the hole to check whether the candidate had testicles.
He had dutifully performed the ritual, and had discovered the truth. But, fearful that the truth would plunge a divided College, not to mention the entire Church, into a bitter and potentially damaging struggle, he chose to conceal his discovery, and as a result she became Pope and he and she together continued to take every conceivable step to conceal her gender identity.
There was, however, more to his decision to deceive his colleagues and perpetuate the charade he had signed onto. He had taken the time and effort beforehand to study the record of her accomplishments as she had risen through the Church. It was an impressive one. And he believed her to be exactly the kind of reformer that an institution grown old and venal over the centuries desperately needed.
In his role as her chief confidant and advisor he had proceeded to work closely with her over the few weeks of her short papal reign. And she had more than met his expectations, delivering a flood of papal bulls and rulings banning long-entrenched corrupt practices, dispersing ill-gotten church resources amongst the poor, dismissing officials and clerics in wholesale numbers at all levels, and even issuing a call for the ultimate revolutionary reform … declaring that priestly celibacy should cease, that women be ordained into the priesthood, and that even the highest levels of the clerical hierarchy be open to them.
In addition he had, of course, fallen in love with her, and fallen prey, incomprehensibly, to turning a blind eye to the mounting determination among his colleagues to get rid of her as quickly as possible and by any means. Yes, incomprehensible from a practical standpoint, perhaps, but then love is blind and never rational.
And so, now, as he gazed up at her nude form, arms outstretched and cruelly nailed through slender wrists, knees bent, feet nailed side-by-side, soles pressed against the face of the cross’s stout upright … the body of his beloved Barbara of Mohr, an obscure district of the Rhenish-Palatinate, and until recently, Pope Innocent XI … his eyes filled with the bitter tears of sadness and regret.
Wiping away the tears with his sleeve he renewed his gaze, slowly raising his view, beginning first with her feet … bloody, pierced and broken. And from there following her splayed open legs upward to where a rough-hewn, blood-stained cornu, affixed to the upright to give her respite from the rigors of crucifixion and prolong her sufferings, protruded from between and beneath her buttocks. The splaying of her legs had also rendered her sex rudely exposed, its outer lips parted to display the delicate intimacies of its inner folds, hood and slit.
However closely she and Praetorio had worked with one another, their relationship had remained chaste, never venturing into the pleasures of the flesh that might easily have come their way, although on at least one occasion they had come dangerously close. She had been Pope, and he her trusted councilor, friend and protector. Quite naturally then, to see her loins so openly exposed was for him a source of deep sorrow and anguish. But also, and uncomfortably so, he was finding it a source of arousal that he wished to control but couldn’t.
Moving on, his eyes advanced quickly over her mons pubis with its triangular thatch of curly dark hair, and on to her slender girlish hips, tautened belly and deeply indented navel. He saw how the serried lines of her ribs defined her chest, stretched and forced outward as it was by the strain of her crucifixion. And riding high were her pale teardrop-shaped breasts, upon which floated, like circles and points, a matched pair of pebbled areolae and perkily erect nipples.
Beyond were a pair of freckled shoulders, tautly outstretched arms, nailed and bloodied wrists, and hands with inwardly clawed fingers. As he watched, her head moved, listing off to one side and coming to rest against shoulder and raised arm, eyes closed and partially veiled by wisps of disheveled hair fallen over her face.
He would have thought her unconscious, were it not for the fact that she broke silence with a long throaty moan, stirred and then struggled and strained vainly to shift her position before exhaustion defeated the effort and she allowed her head to fall forward, chin resting against her chest.
She lives and suffers so, he thought to himself. But for how much longer? Soon the crowds would return, to gawk and point at her once again, as they had the previous day, and to pitilessly mock her … all part of the theatre … the humiliation and repudiation that her staged public execution by crucifixion on St. Peter’s Square had been contrived so carefully to evoke.
Praetorio bowed his head once again in grief. He felt responsible for her, for all that had happened. He had been blinded by ambition and righteousness and, yes, by her intelligence and beauty. And it had all gone so terribly wrong.
She stirred. Crying out in anguish she once again attempted to push herself up with her legs, but she simply hadn’t the strength and was soon forced, after raising herself slightly, to fall back … succeeding only in impaling herself further on that dreadful cornu. Then she lifted her head momentarily as though to speak. He thought she had detected his presence. But all she managed was to blink her eyes once or twice.
Despondent, Praetorio settled back on his haunches, resolved to maintain his lonely vigil until the crowds returned.
And as he knelt there, alone with his thoughts, he allowed his mind to relive the past three days, and their sequence of events .. her betrayal and discovery, her arrest and confinement in the dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo, her staged torture, confessions and trial in the Sistine Chapel before the assembled College of Cardinals, her condemnation and the revelation of a shockingly unprecedented sentence, condemning her to be crucified and shamed as an antichrist before an enraged public in St. Peter’s Square, and the horrors of how that symbolic display had played out over the course of the previous day.
TBC
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